Did you know that Chrome is such an awesome browser, it saves the content of text fields even when your computer spontaneously crashes with a blue screen of death after you just spent an hour writing the latest top 50 streamers list writeup?

For those of you who don't already know what this is about: I'm gathering various data (viewers, game, events, etc.) from all the streams that are presented on teamliquid.net (those that you can in the sidebar to your right) and use that data to produce the pretty tables and graphs you see below. The tables only contain SC2 players (that is, streams of people playing games of Starcraft 2) and not casters, teams or other streams. The tables also only contain Starcraft 2 related activities. So, for instance when CatZ is streaming Dota2, it will not be taken into account.

The data I gather is then turned into the tables you see below. One is sorted by the average viewers, the other is sorted by the average viewers times the hours streamed. The latter table favors those that stream a lot, while the former table favors popular streamers regardless of how much they stream. Either ranking has its advantages and disadvantages, and thus I present both.

For either table, I have a minimum required stream time of 5 hours to be included in the list.

The list

Due to space limitations, I have to shorten the headers and leave some data out of the tables presented here. You can get the full tables from the links below.The headers aren't as clear as I'd like them to be thanks to this, so here's a quick explanation, just in case: "Viewers" denotes the average viewers in the given month. "Hours" are the hours played. "Place diff" and "Viewer diff" are the place and viewer differences compared to last month.

Also, the HTML version linked beneath the images has some more information that I had to leave out due to space limitation, most notably the featured status of the players.

Also also, go and check outFuzic! Stijn created the awesome looking website with all kinds of stream viewership data. It's much better suited for immediate numbers and analyzing numbers from singular events. Also, it's way prettier than anything I could've ever design. (Note that his project is completely independent from mine, so if you have any questions about it, please ask him and not me. )

Wait wait wait.. Where's Flash? Surely everyone expected him to grab the #1 spot right away. And you would have guessed right, if he had only streamed a little more. But alas, Flash only streamed one session, roughly lasting 3 hours. It takes a minimum of 5 hours to be eligible for the top 50 lists, however, as otherwise the data would be too unreliable.So yes, if that rule would not have been in effect, Flash would have easily taken first place, with 9700 viewers on average, and a peak of 11037 viewers, numbers far beyond anyone else in this month's list.

And thanks to this, Grubby finally made it to first place! Congratulations!

The top 4 players of this month didn't stream all that much in the last 30 days, with Bomber, Polt and DeMusliM all streaming for less than 10 hours in total, while Grubby streamed for less than 20.

IdrA did stream a good ~60 hours, and yet his viewership went down once again, losing over 600 viewers on average. That's still enough for a respectable fifth place, though.

WTF PainUser. How can a human being stream for 477 hours in one month? No wonder you fall asleep while streaming.

Here's some information on some of the lesser known names in the lists:

Hui:Hui is a Taiwanese player who is mostly playing in the TeSL. His fanbase seems to be found mostly outside of teamliquid and in the Taiwanese community, unsurprisingly.

I still have no way of getting MC's stream numbers, since he is streaming from azubu.tv. He's not listed on teamliquid (see the other thread), and there does not seem to be an API for azubu.tv either, so it's currently not possible to get live viewer data from them. I keep making jokes about azubu.tv dying and MC returning to twitch every month at this spot, but so far it has not happened.

Similarly, I do not include Take (from TakeTV fame), even though he does stream himself playing in his become-a-pro series, as he streams from his main account, which is online pretty much 24/7, offering a variety of tournaments and rebroadcasts, and thus ends up in my "casters" category.

Notable absentees this month: Naniwa, Byun, Happy, JYP.

If you find any mistakes or errors in the lists, please do let me know, especially concerning team changes or players that you are absolutely sure should be on the lists, but are not.

The big picture

(The actual numbers are not important, it's the ratio between month that's important.)

We're all gonna die!

So, yes. Humor aside, this does look pretty terrible. The player stream viewership is about as high as it was during the drought at the end of last year where the HotS has been closed, but HotS itself has not yet been released, and everyone lost interest in WoL. And this time, there's no such obvious excuse for these numbers. Have people simply lost interest in watching players stream? Or is SC2 really dying?

Well, no. It's not. Player streams are clearly suffering lately, that much is undoubtedly true. But we cannot extrapolate that onto the whole of SC2.

I never included a similar graph to the one above including all SC2 stream numbers, simply because back when I started gathering data, all the big tournaments (MLG, IPL, GSL, etc.) did not provide live viewer numbers and, if at all, only published them later on (usually in a widely exaggerated manner, giving out unique instead of concurrent viewers and so on. Hello, MLG!). But that has changed. MLG and IPL are gone, and GSL streams on twitch now. Dreamhack has always offered live viewership numbers, because they're cool that way, so practically every premier tournament these days offers these numbers.

So I now can provide these numbers. Awesome. So I created the same graph as above, just with all SC2 related streams. But, again, note that all pre-HotS numbers are incomplete and are missing most big tournaments. So do not compare these with anything. I only leave them in to give you a rough idea, but what's important here are the months since HotS came out.

So no, we cannot say that HotS numbers are better than WoL numbers overall, even if it looks like that. It's likely that it is true nonetheless, but without all the data, there's no way of saying for sure.

(The actual numbers are not important, it's the ratio between month that's important.)

But what we can say, however, is that SC2 is not dying. The numbers are not going up, clearly, but they are largely stable. Interest in player streams seems to be getting lower, but WCS and other tournaments seem to easily take up the slack to keep the people watching their favorite game.

WCS

The usual caveats applies:

The numbers are only from twitch.tv.

That means: No numbers from anyone watching on gomtv.net.

No numbers from Korean TV (duh).

No numbers from Chinese streaming sites.

When there are multiple streams for one event, I will add them up only if they are different language streams. If they are the same language (OSL/GSL), I pick the stream with the higher average viewership.

We had all that drama about how putting the WCS regional finals on the weekend where The International 3 was a Very Bad Idea. And, admittedly, it probably was. And it clearly did hurt the viewership numbers. But it didn't hurt them nearly as bad as some people have prophecised.

For WCS EU, slightly shy of 50.000 viewers is not exactly something to be proud about, but given the circumstances, those are pretty okay numbers. The OSL finals, however, seem quite low. However, as with the whole season, WCS KR had two English language streams, and while people usually stayed true to Tastosis throughout the season and barely gave the OSL guys a chance, the numbers were way more even during the finals. So it's very likely that a lot of people watched either one stream or the other, which would mean that there were far more than 20.000 viewers for the WCS KR finals after all.

The WCS season finals also got pretty good numbers, peaking at over 100.000 (again, excluding Korean and Chinese viewers), with steadily growing viewership throughout the three days of play.

Go and check out these events at Fuzic for much more detailed numbers: Here is the page for the second day of the WCS finals, for instance. You can easily see when exactly a foreigner just lost a match. Again, check out that site, it's awesome.

Proleague vs. ATC vs. SC2L

I've decided to include SC2L numbers this month, since there was only the Proleague final and no GSTL at all last month. ATC only had their final, too, so for you team league fans out there, there was only SC2L to watch.

Team leagues have never been as popular in the west as they have been in Korea, and so it's no surprise that these numbers aren't that high. The ATC and Proleague finals did pretty decently all things considered, though. SC2L still has to find its audience, perhaps, as their viewer numbers are fluctuating quite a bit. We'll see how things develop.

So that's all for this month.Hope you guys enjoyed, as always. Any kind of feedback is always welcome!

Does anyone else think the diminishing viewer count could have something to do with twitch being not-so-good lately? I know I've watched way less in the last couple of months than before because most of the time the streams are barely watchable because of lag.

Thanks a lot. I also blame Hearthstone for less viewers on player streams. Personally I'm watching lots of Hearthstone lately and am sure others do too, since it's a Blizzard game and naturally lots of people want to try/watch it.

On September 02 2013 03:10 MasterOfPuppets wrote:Just a little question: why is Tasteless on the list, considering he doesn't play or cast SC2 on his stream? :/

Streamers can set the game they play in their streamer interface on teamliquid. Tasteless has the game set to SC2 (probably because that's the default, I think). I can't check every stream all the time to see if they really play what they supposedly play, and it happens all the time that streamers forget to change their game in the interface when they play another game.

Also, it's Tasteless. Though if anyone could poke him to change the game to "Misc." (or was it "Other"?), that would certainly solve the issue as well.